Haruki Murakami Quotes

When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It's like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly.

I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream - I was surprised to find it happening.

This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.

No matter where i go, i still end up me. What's missing never changes. The scenery may change, but i'm still the same incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that i can never satisfy. I think that lack itself is as close as i'll come to defining myself.

It was a small room with dim light coming in the window, reminiscent of old Polish films.

She's always polite and kind, but her words lack the kind of curiosity and excitement you'd normally expect. Her true feelings- assuming such things exist- remain hidden away. Except for when a practical sort of decision has to be made, she never gives her personal opinion about anything. She seldom talks about herself, instead letting others talk, nodding warmly as she listens. But most people start to feel vaguely uneasy when talking with her, as if they suspect they're wasting her time, trampling on her private, graceful, dignified world. And that impression is, for the most part, correct.

That's wrong," she declared. "Everyone must have one thing that they can excel at. It's just a matter of drawing it out, isn't it? But school doesn't know how to draw it out. It crushes the gift. It's no wonder most people never get to be what they want to be. They just get ground down.

Sometimes taking time is actually a shortcut.

Let me just tell you this, Watanabe," said Midori, pressing her cheek against my neck. "I'm a real, live girl, with real, live blood gushing through my veins. You're holding me in your arms and I'm telling you that I love you. I'm ready to do anything you tell me to do. I may be a little bit mad, but I'm a good girl, and honest, and I work hard, I'm kind of cute, I have nice boobs, I'm a good cook, and my father left me a trust fund. I mean, I'm a real bargain, don't you think? If you don't take me, I'll end up going somewhere else.

Listening to the music while stretching her body close to its limit, she was able to attain a mysterious calm. She was simultaneously the torturer and the tortured, the forcer and the forced. This sense of inner-directed self-sufficiency was what she wanted most of all. It gave her deep solace.

I never made any plan before writing, however I succeeded. I enjoyed writing with excitement ,"what happen on the next page?"

It's a terrible thing when a person dies, whatever the circumstances. A hole opens up in the world, and we need to pay the proper respects. If we don't, the hole will never be filled in again.

But I found that the longer you teach, the more you feel like a total stranger to yourself

Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt.

I'll be happy if running and I can grow old together.

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

Symbolism and meaning are two separate things. I think she found the right words by bypassing procedures like meaning and logic. She captured words in a dream, like delicately catching hold of a butterfly’s wings as it flutters around. Artists are those who can evade the verbose.

Irrepressible curiosity vied with an instinctive fear.

That's how people live in the real world: forcing stuff on each other.

And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

He felt as if his heart had dried up. I needed her he thought. I needed someone like her to fill the void inside me. But I wasn’t able to fill the void inside her. Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone.

Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone.

When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

We all die and disappear, but that's because the mechanism of the world itself is built on destruction and loss.

I’m not good at talking,” Naoko said. “Haven’t been for the longest while. I start to say something and the wrong words come out. Wrong or sometimes completely backward. I try to go back and correct it, but things get even more complicated and confused, so that I don’t even remember what I started to say in the first place. Like I was split into two or something, one half chasing the other. And there’s this big pillar in the middle and they go chasing each other around and around it. The other me always latches onto the right word and this me absolutely never catches up

Adults need more complex narratives. They have their own narratives. The main characters are themselves.

Whenever I look at the ocean, I always want to talk to people, but when I'm talking to people, I always want to look at the ocean.

Not everything was lost in the flow of time

she was beautiful and seemingly quite intelligent, what with her pentameter search system. There wasn't a reason in the world not to find her appealing.

What I want is for the two of us to meet somewhere by chance one day, like, passing on the street, or getting on the same bus.

Gazing at the rain, I consider what it means to belong, to become part of something. To have someone cry for me.

And it was the kind of thing that loses the most important nuances when reduced to words. He had never told anyone about it, and he probably never would.

Have books ‘happened’ to you? Unless your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I’m unsure how to talk to you

Even if there were two of me, I still couldn't do all that has to be done. No matter what, though, I keep up my running. Running every day is a kind of lifeline for me, so I'm not going to lay off or quit just because I'm busy. If I used being busy as an excuse not to run, I'd never run again. I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit. All I can do is keep those few reasons nicely polished.

I was confident that I was a special person. But time slowly chips away at life. People don't just die when their time comes. They gradually die away, from the inside. And finally the day comes when you have to settle accounts. Nobody can escape it. People have to pay the price for what they've received. I have only just learned that truth.

"Dance," said the Sheep Man. "Yougottadance. Aslongasthemusicplays. Yougotta dance. Don'teventhinkwhy. Starttothink, yourfeetstop. Yourfeetstop, wegetstuck. Wegetstuck, you'restuck. Sodon'tpayanymind, nomatterhowdumb. Yougottakeepthestep. Yougottalimberup. Yougottaloosenwhatyoubolteddown. Yougottauseallyougot. Weknowyou're tired, tiredandscared. Happenstoeveryone, okay? Justdon'tletyourfeetstop."

Those five fingers and that palm were like a display case crammed full of everything I wanted to know--and everything I had to know. By taking my hand, she showed me what these things were. That within the real world, a place like this existed. In the space of those ten seconds I became I tiny bird, fluttering in the air, the wind rushing by. From high in the sky I could see a scene far away. It was so far off I couldn't make it out clearly, yet something was there, and I knew that someday I would travel to that place.

This is the extent of his knowledge of the sea: it was very big, it was salty, and fish lived there.

Loving another person is a wonderful thing, and if that love is sincere, no one ends up tossed into a labyrinth. You have to have more faith in yourself.

You always look so cool, like no matter what happens, it’s got nothing to do with you, but you’re not really like that. In your own way, you’re out there fighting as hard as you can, even if other people can’t tell by looking at you.

The moon had been observing the earth close-up longer than anyone. It must have witnessed all of the phenomena occurring - and all of the acts carried out - on this earth. But the moon remained silent; it told no stories.

Everyone just keeps on disappearing. Some things vanish, like they were cut away. Others fade slowly into the mist. And all that remains is a desert.

I'm always tripped up by the eternal who am I?

In the world we live in, what we know and what we don't know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion.

I think most people live in fiction...That's how you keep your fragile body intact.

I hate requests. They make me feel unhappy. It's like when I take a book out of the library. As soon as I start to read it, all I can think about is when I'll finish it.

I could have been a cult writer if I'd kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book.

I want to write stories that are different from the ones I've written so far, Junpei thought: I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love. But right now I have to stay here and keep watch over this woman and this girl. I will never let anyone-not anyone-try to put them into that crazy box- not even if the sky should fall or the earth crack open with a roar.